Just a few random thoughts on a January afternoon, begun during a pink-and-blue sunset and ended with the rising of Jupiter, four of whose moons were first seen through a telescope by Galileo 403 years ago this week.

As December ended, I had to say goodbye to two friends in two different ways.

One needed to move off-Cape. One died.

The mover I could at least help with thrift shop and dump runs, coffee or lunch for a little break, and even taking home a few treasures as reminders of our friendship: some tiny glass Christmas ornaments, a great travel vest with lots of pockets, an Egyptian black cat goddess, a table just right for displaying my crèche collection.

The other died in her sleep at home. The news, which came over the phone from a mutual friend (in fact, I had introduced them) came so suddenly and irrevocably that I started to cry right during the call. There was no time to hang up. For this friend, it was go to a service, listen to friends and family speak, drive home into a blinding, setting sun that bounced off a fresh snow.

My two friends never met, although I guess they might have liked each other’s lively minds and sense of humor and respect for a spiritual side to life that has nothing to do with organized religion and its rigid rules. For instance, the friend who died once looked into the possibility of ordination. The committee who interviewed her told her that she “really needed“ to take a course in administration; they were not swayed when she told them she already had earned an MBA.

Here is what’s interesting, if you like coincidences.

My friend who was moving reached into a closet one day as I was helping her sort and pack.

“Would you like this?” she said as she held out a lovely blazer in a deep shade of eggplant purple.

I honestly wasn’t sure. For years now, my wardrobe has skewed to red, white, and black. Those colors go together, they look well on me, and I don’t have to think about what to buy or how to mix them.

Now here was eggplant.

“Well, I don’t usually wear purple,” I hedged.

“Oh, come on. Try it,” she coaxed. “I’ll be honest if it doesn’t look good on you,” she promised.

I slipped on the blazer and I looked in a mirror. It looked good. I kept it. I wore it to a Christmas party.

Later, when I got the news of my other friend’s death, I realized that she, too, had given me eggplant purple in the form of a sweater she had knit as a surprise for me. Such a surprise that she had never taken a measurement. The sweater, which fits me perfectly, was knit by my friend just by her eyeball guess of everything from my neck size to the length of my arms.

I wore that sweater, of course, to her memorial service. It meant warmth on a January day, but I swear that if she’d died in July I’d have at least carried it with me for the beauty of its pattern and the care that had gone into its making.

So, now there are two deep, dark purple garments in my closet. Each one whispers of a friendship that draws me into a new range of the spectrum.

In the fall of 2011, another friend of mine had died. This one was a yoga teacher and, as I took her classes, she had opened me to the idea of the spiritual meanings of color.

Red, this friend said, symbolized the life force that binds us to everything alive – plants, animals, planets far away. Orange, she would say, is about the bonds we forge in our lives, and yellow stands for “everything that is me and is not you.”

Green symbolizes the heart and its way to embrace life; blue stands for the throat and the ability to speak the truth; and purple poises on the edge of a higher consciousness, where we dream and envision and intuit. In Christian symbolism, it is the color of Advent and Lent, the seasons when something life-changing is about to happen.